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Super
8: State Wrestling
This is part of a series of articles based on images from my 1970s home movies. For more details, click here.
It was March of 1975. I was finishing my first year as the program director at Cable TV-3 in Washington, Pennsylvania. High school wrestling was very popular there. Fans flocked not only to the local school-vs-school matches our cable channel televised one of these each week but even to the PIAA state tournament for individual wrestlers that was held each spring. The local radio station, WJPA-AM, broadcast the two-day state tournament in its entirety. Pete Stanton had been handling the announcing since 1950. He called the action live all day and night. According to Chuck Finders 2000 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, Pete was equipped with a hand-held microphone and a three-inch stack of commercials to read. He described, as best he could, 192 matches in Fridays first round and all the matches that followed. TV-3 also found it profitable to broadcast the state tourney. We spent about $1,000 to do so and earned about $2,000 in advertising revenue. However, we couldnt telecast it live; that would have been prohibitively expensive. We recorded the action on videocassettes. When the weekend was over, we drove back to Washington with the tapes, to be aired on Monday and Tuesday nights. Because we werent live, we could be selective. We taped only the wrestlers from our general coverage area (basically Washington and Greene counties), followed by the complete championship round for the larger schools. Even with that restraint, our playbacks ran for about four hours on Monday night and four more on Tuesday. I took along my movie camera to record the behind-the-scenes images you see below.
On Thursday evening, March 13, 1975, after our regular TV-3 programming signed off at 8:00 PM, we grabbed a quick nap, then reconvened after midnight to disconnect the studio equipment that we would need for our remote operation. We stacked everything in the TV-3 lobby so we could check that we weren't forgetting everything. |
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I had once attended the Ohio state high school tournament, at St. John Arena on the campus of Ohio State. But 1975 would mark my first trip to the Pennsylvania championships. They were being held at Penn State Universitys Rec Hall, the home of Nittany Lion basketball and other sports. I would be traveling to State College with our camera operator Tim Verderber and our sportscaster Larry Schwingel, who had been there the year before for TV-3s inaugural coverage of the event. Our analyst, traveling separately, would be Trinity High Schools Paul Abraham. He had arranged for Tim and Larry and me to use of one of his schools rooms at the hotel next to the arena.
Two wrestling mats had been set up on Penn States basketball court, and boys were competing on each. Our assigned position was near the red X in the first photo below, on the balcony, a running track that circled the building just below the roof. UPDATE: The second photo below comes from somebody's video half a century later. On February 21, 2024, a crowd of 6,150 fans stormed the court. They were celebrating Penn State's upset victory over No. 12 Illinois, only the fourth men's basketball game at Rec Hall in 28 years. The Nittany Lions had come back from an 89-82 deficit with 35 seconds left to win 90-89, improving their all-time record in the 95-year-old building to 517-184. |
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Next, to be played back before that match, Larry recorded a welcome to State College intro segment. Then we had a little time to catch our breath and meet some of our neighbors along the balconys press row. One table had been assigned to the announcers from Erie's WQLN. Their engineers unloaded a massive quad video tape recorder from their truck and hooked it up in the ground-level electrical room near where we had entered the building. (During the finals, normally one match is immediately followed by the next. But this year, there was an intermission of several minutes between the sixth and seventh matches. The public address announcer explained that the TV folks had filled their first reel of two-inch video tape, which now had to be rewound and replaced with a fresh reel. The crowd booed. We had no such concerns, as our video cassettes could be swapped rather quickly.)
Channel 39s usual wrestling announcers were Sheldon Siegel and Marvin Wilenzik. At one of those later tournaments, I was keeping track of the team standings, and when one of the schools clinched the title I returned the color-video favor by relaying the news to WLVT analyst Larry Sheridan. Shel, the lead announcer, was actually the president of the station. He had managed it since its founding ten years before, and he would hold that post until 1994, when he retired after admitting he had authorized staffers to phone in fake bids to raise the ante during the stations on-air fund-raising auction. Another of our press row neighbors in 1975 was from Jersey Shore. (Im not referring to the seacoast; Pennsylvania is miles from any ocean. So why is there a shore in the middle of the state? After the Revolutionary War, immigrants from New Jersey built a town on the Susquehanna Rivers western bank, which became known as the Jersey shore.)
One of our neighbors was not very neighborly. We dont know who did it, but between Friday night and Saturday morning somebody absconded with part of our equipment, namely the Rover handheld camera and portable recorder. We never saw that Rover again. Insurance money eventually bought us a replacement.
Up on the balcony, my job was to start and stop the videocassette recorder and log the times. In later years, I also did some of the announcing, mostly in a host role. I read the sponsors billboards and introduced the next match. Then, being no expert on wrestling holds, I turned the microphone over to the others to describe the action. But there was one match a championship in the smaller-schools division when our regular announcers were going to be absent. I had to do the play-by-play myself. At one point I commented something like this:
I was proud of myself for knowing enough to anticipate the refs rather obvious call.
Tomorrow would be another day, with more wrestling action cheered on by more fans. |
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One nervous supporter couldn't bear to be close to the action. She got as far away as she could, standing on the running track high above the end zone. In the sequence of four dim but enhanced frames above, she screamed out to her wrestler, wilted with disappointment, and turned away.
On Sunday, we would drive home. The tapes were shown to our cable TV subscribers over the following two nights. Another milestone in sports television!
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